Black Hephaistos: exploring culture and science in African iron working (1995; 48 mins) скачать в хорошем качестве

Black Hephaistos: exploring culture and science in African iron working (1995; 48 mins)

The video presents traditional African iron-smelting and forging in the field and in the lab. Uniting ritual, magical, and technical aspects, smelting technology is metaphorically linked to procreation. Video footage, filmed in 1989 and 1993 in the Mandara highlands of Cameroon and Nigeria, records the process of smelting iron by Ajokfa, a Plata Kapa iron master, and fining and forging by Hundu, a Sukur smith who lives and works within the UNESCO World Heritage Sukur Cultural Landscape across the border in Nigeria. The viewer participates also in metallurgical laboratory work, including optical and electron microscopy, that reveals the workings of traditional iron metallurgy. The scene shifts back and forth between Central Africa and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Arizona, where Dr David Killick demonstrates how scientific understanding of these processes is gained through metallurgical analyses of their products and byproducts.  This, the third of Nic David’s films on society and technology in the Mandara mountains, benefits from some use (in Sukur) of Sony’s Hi-8 camcorder, but the videography is still of a technical quality significantly inferior to that of the present day. Nonetheless the bringing together of field and lab aspects of metallurgical research offers new perspectives on the integration within Mandara Mountains’ cultures of technology, society and religion.